In a nutshell

Christmas is a time of year for family and a peak period for interest in family history – and Ancestry wanted to celebrate both

Ancestry

Ancestry On Message For Christmas With Sir Tony Robinson

About the Brand

Ancestry is the world’s largest online family history research, with over 16 billion records and more than 70 million family trees Committed to helping people across the globe discover more about their past, they have built a dedicated community of more than two million subscribers.

Sir Tony Robinson and Third City helped Ancestry give some very special Christmas presents this year

The festive period is a special time for family, sharing stories together around the fire when it’s cold outside. That might be what makes Christmas such a great period for people looking into their family’s past with the help of our client, family history website Ancestry.

Christmas 2015 saw us launch an interactive social campaign celebrating the family at Christmas, saying ‘thank you’ to Ancestry’s online community with the help of actor and historian Sir Tony Robinson, as well as drawing interest from the wider public.

Social media users and Ancestry members were invited to request a personalised Christmas message for their family from Sir Tony through Twitter and Facebook. Interest was huge, with over 1,000 likes for the launch posts and hundreds of entries.

We made the best messages a reality, posting them through Christmas week along with a broader Christmas message to the world. These videos registered over 16,000 organic views in the week of publishing alone, being widely shared by the happy people who had their personalised messages read by Sir Tony.

Messages included a greeting from Sandra Kirkham to her family, who she only knew after finding them through Ancestry, and Robin Croucher who asked Tony’s help to propose to his girlfriend. She said yes, by the way.